Inner Peace

If you can start the day without caffeine,
If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it,
If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can conquer tension without medical help,
If you can relax without liquor,
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,

You must be the family dog.
(and you thought I was gonna go all spiritual on you)
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Amazing Human Tricks

This one just gets better and better...



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Peanuts

I've developed a new philosophy ... I only dread one day at a time.
- Charlie Brown

The way I see it, it doesn't matter what you believe, just so you're sincere.
- Linus
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77 Million Paintings

A two-part video from Brian Eno, self-proclaimed "evangelical atheist"...





We need to prepare for this state of mind that says,
"I'm not in control, and I like it."
- Brian Eno
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The Positive Impact of Negative Space

These are so cool. A link to a graphic design site (thru Dan Pink's Blog):

"All you negative space fans out there (and you know who you are) might like this collection of 25 logos with hidden messages from graphicdesignblog.org. Two of my favorites are below, but the other 23 are also worth your time."


It never ceases to amaze me what the human mind can come up with.

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The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

A LateralAction (Mark McGuinness) interview with Dan Pink

Daniel H. Pink is the author of a trio of provocative, bestselling books on the changing world of work:

Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need

Dan's new book, Drive, is subtitled 'the surprising truth about what motivates us'. It introduces some scientific research that turns business practice on its head and offers all of us a more inspiring and meaningful vision of work, and ultimately of life.

"There's a myth in business that the only way to get people to perform at a high level is with carrots and sticks. But that's just wrong - not wrong morally, but wrong scientifically. Forty years of science tells us that those sorts of motivators - If you do this, then you'll get that - do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. And for creative conceptual work, those if-then motivators usually make things worse."

"The better approach - more enduring and more effective - is motivation built around three ingredients:
~ Autonomy (the desire to direct our own lives)
~ Mastery (the urge to get better at things that matter), and
~ Purpose (the desire to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.)

This guy is really interesting, and his vision of what fires us up will stretch your mind way past some preconceptions you might not know you had.
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You cannot achieve great success until you are faithful to yourself
- Friedrich W. Nietzsche
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12 Things Cats Are Trying To Teach Us

1. Pounce on opportunity. He who hesitates, misses catching the passing lizard.

2. Patience. Infinite patience...

3. Concentration. A cat studying an opportunity just beyond his grasp is the epitome of focused attention. He doesn't even blink as he tunes out all distractions. His body is completely still except for his wildly twitching tail releasing his nervous energy.

4. Nothing is worth disturbing your beauty sleep.

5. Catnap. Even a few moments of shut-eye is refreshing.

6. If you're happy, purr. Show your appreciation by letting people know that you like what they do.

7. Do cat stretches - as we age, gentle stretching is one of the best things we can do for our bodies.

8. Wrestle with your best friend. She likes it when you're playful.

9. Eat when you're hungry and not by the clock.

10. Ask for what you want. If you are lovable and patient, you will probably get it.

11. You can't have everything you want. If you put your claws where they don't belong, you're going to get spanked.

12. Revel in life's simple pleasures. A ball of string is magic. Catnip is heavenly.
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What's New Pussycat?
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Spiritual Transformation Is Not a Psychological Process

Authentic spiritual or mystical transformation is not a psychological process. Mystical teachings go deeper than that - they refer to the nature of consciousness and the structure of the evolving cosmos we are living in.

Many people interpret these teachings as injunctions or instructions, and they can be used in that way, but they really represent a deeper and more subtle dimension of reality itself. And when you begin to look at mystical or enlightenment teachings as laws and subtle structures that actually exist, rather than ideas that someone came up with, your relationship to them changes significantly. You realize that they represent an absolute truth, and you have to work with them. These principles become the path, you walk in a straight line, and you will see development occur. You can’t go wrong.

Andrew Cohen
EnlightenNext Magazine
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Carl Jung on Synchronicity

"Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history." - from Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960).

A friend's recent blogpost got me thinking about beliefs, then a short article from DreamThisDay popped up featuring the above quote by Carl Jung in the context of how even our most firmly held beliefs change over time.

Intrigued by the title of the book, found an interesting piece on synchronicity, a term which not incidentally was coined by Jung to describe what we might call meaningful coincidence. However, Jung felt that where a meaningful relationship obviously exists between events in the apparent absence of any causal connection, a much different principle is operating. This principle, which he called synchronicity, "...compassed his concept of the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history - social, emotional, psychological and spiritual."

From the Crystalinks site: "Synchronicities are people, places or events that your soul attracts into your life to help you evolve to higher consciousness or to place emphasis on something going on in your life. The more consciously aware you become of how your soul manifests, the higher your frequency becomes and the faster you manifest positively. Each day of your life encounters meaningful coincidences, synchronicities, that you have attracted - in other words created in the grid of your experiences in the physical."

"Souls create synchronicities, played out in the physical. It is why you are here. It is how our reality works."
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We Don't See Things As They Are

...we see things as we are - Anais Nin.

Anais Nin was a remarkable writer, brutally honest and uncompromising in her portrayals of life and love. I first encountered her during my existential phase in the mid-80s through her novel A Spy In The House of Love. I was delighted and moved today to be reminded of her through a brief article from DreamThisDay.

An excerpt from A Spy In The House of Love:

"She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief the shortness of life's physical span. Death was terrifyingly near and the journey towards it vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one aging, one death and then transmitted the monotonous cycle to their children.

"But Sabina, activated by the moon rays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad of lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courtesan depositor of multiple desires. The seeds of many lives, places, of many women in herself were fecundated by the moon rays because they came from that limitless night life which we usually perceive only in our dreams, containing roots reaching for all the magnificence of the past, transmitting the rich sediments into the present, projecting them into the future."
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Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings - AN
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There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. - AN
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